Tis The Season....

for cotton harvest!! Dad started stripping cotton yesterday, so I took the opportunity to snap a few shots. The field is so white that from the highway it looks like snow. This could possible be one of his best fields ever, and he has grown some pretty good cotton these last couple of years.











This picture is blurry, but he had just dumped a load onto the bowl buggy, which my brother is driving. And Preston is moving the cotton around so that they can get more into the buggy. The first time you see this done you think that they are going to dump it on the ground!










Here he is dumping the cotton into the module builder, and from there is gets pressed into a nice block of cotton that can be hauled away.

















Isn't it beautiful?










"Riding off into the sunset"!











When I was little, my family raised lots of cotton as did others in this valley. I remember getting to jump in the cotton trailers to smash down the cotton so that they could get as much as possible in the trailers. We also lived right next to the cotton gin, and I remember one time spending the night inside of one of the trailers. All those fun memories came flooding back yesterday with the smell of the cotton! What a wonderful life growing up as a farm kid....and being a farmer's wife!!

One of those weeks.....

Side Note: Had my blog done ready to post and it erased this picture. So, it's story is below!













OK, so this is a random blog for me to vent a little bit! I'll start with this picture that I took back in May, just thought that it looked really cool. Last May, when my mom and I went to Denton, I found this wagon wheel at an antique shop...still haven't done anything with it, but it looks kind of neat leaning against my house! ;)






This month marks a year since we put Windy down, and got Praise. I was browsing my old pictures and found this one when Jason and I first went and looked at him.


This is Praise this summer. I just talked to the lady that we bought him from this last week. When I called her and told her who I was she was SO excited to hear from me. She lives close to where we go to church and she had been driving around the different church parking lots trying to find our pickup!! I gave her an update on him, and told her that he is the best horse that we have ever owned, which is true.

Now, for this last week.....it basically started out bad. I was filled with frustration, disappointment, and sadness, hoping that the week would get better. Well, it didn't. We finally got a combine on Thursday to harvest out pinto beans, and that night as Jason was backing up to dump the last load the back axle broke. Did I mention that it's not even our combine? It's still not fixed, but it is no longer sitting on the ground. On Saturday, we were able to get another combine here and we will be done by today.

It rained last night, on our hay that was ready to be baled. Lovely. How in the world we have had so much rained on hay, but yet are still so dry is beyond my comprehension. And the clouds are building again today. We have had lighting and thunder, just like it is monsoon season. Weird.

Sick calves. Coccidiosis to be exact. I told Jason that this is more stressful than a newborn baby.....I think anyway! Every night I'm dreaming of these calves and trying to keep them alive and healthy. And with harvest being in full swing, I find myself there a lot by myself. But I really do enjoy spending time with them.

Maybe this week will be better!

Our Latest Project

For weeks, Jason has stayed up late crunching numbers and building spread sheets. For weeks, all he talked about were calves, what we would buy, where we would keep them, how to turn our rained on hay into money. Well, after weeks and weeks and weeks, we finally have calves!





These two pictures are some calves that we bought right from the ranch last week. There is one in this group that I call Stitch, from the Disney cartoon "Lilo and Stitch". And once I get a picture of him, you'll know why but he is the cutest little thing!







These calves came from the sale barn two weeks ago and there is more of them, but I did not want to bore you with pictures of calves, that is if you are still reading this! ;) We have had to doctor them several times to get them over shipping fever. As of today, everyone is fat and happy!


So, basically, what all of the this means is that we are going nowhere this winter. Just 8 miles down the road to check on our sweet little calves and back again!!